Roasted Veggies, Homemade Marshmallows, & Apple Pie Experiments

Yesterday I went on a bit of a cooking frenzy.  I was inspired by my kids to batch up some breakfast items.  Every morning I get "what is there to eat?" thing and there is never anything they want.  So I decided to solve that problem for the next couple of weeks.  So I batched up (with their help) a bunch of breakfast burritos and pancakes.  That got me rolling.  I had read something about "breakfast pies".  I asked the girls if they'd eat such a thing.  Both said no resoundingly!  But then the last box of apples from our tree sitting in our garage popped in my mind.  So I let my imagination chew on that and "breakfast pies" for a bit and proceeded to make a shopping list. 

I couldn't decide what to make.  I had several ideas in my head, so I decided to buy refrigerator crescent rolls, but then I found something better.  Crescent Recipe Creations.  I took this stuff home and placed 6 pieces of dough in 6 muffin tins.  I proceeded to make various mini apple pies involving fresh apples, cooked apples in a pie mixture, 3 kinds of cheese, and bacon.  Yes bacon.  All turned out good, but there will be further experimentation to perfect the faves (based on my families' so sophisticated taste buds - and I'm not joking here).  I'll post my final recipe when done.  Here are a few pictures of what I did:

 

 

 

Just FYI.  The pies involving bacon were a hit!

Then I went on to make dinner.  I've been craving roasted root veggies lately, so I made up a pasta dish involving roasted carrots, parsnips, turnips, onions, garlic, celery and mushrooms.

I peeled and chopped up a turnip, two parsnips, and 3 carrots.  I then peeled and quartered an onion, chopped the ends off of about 10 cloves of garlic (so you can easily squeeze out the roasted garlic), chopped up 2 ribs of celery, and cleaned about 10 button mushrooms.  I tossed them with about 1/8 cup of olive oil, kosher salt and fresh ground pepper.  I roasted all of that in a 450 degree oven for 30 minutes.  I then cooked up a little over a half lb of campenelle pasta.  I tossed the veggies and pasta with my butter sage sauce, which was about 1 tablespoon of bacon grease (from the pie project) 3 tablespoons of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil.  I threw in 1/4 cup of sage leaves and fried them in the butter mixture until they were nice an deliciously crisp.

It was a fall comfort delight!

Then, for the  Pièce de résistance!

 

Homemade Marshmallows!  These were so easy and fun.  I'm not a huge fan of marshmallows, so I wondered if homemade would be better.  I figured if they weren't, my kids love marshmallows, so nothing would go to waste.

Were they good?

Hell yeah!

Then I found out this is similar to the recipe Thomas Keller uses along with homemade graham crackers (this recipe isn't his).  Guess what I'm thinking of making next......LOL!

If you want to try making your own (a fun way to impress people at a potluck and it's simple) you can find the recipe at Epicurious.com or where I originally saw it at Bon Appetit Magazine.

So now I'm dragging my behind off the computer and heading out to my garden to produce another round of food to cook and write about.

Happy Fall!